Broken Things and Fairies' Wings

Ever since childhood, his parents told him that magic was real. And he believed them. Wholeheartedly.  He kept believing when his friends told him that magic was nonsense. He didn't stop believing when he entered middle school and classmates picked on him for it. He didn't stop believing when upperclassmen threw open soda cans in his bag and threw it across the field and told him he was stupid and that magic was stupid and that logic could explain everything he used as evidence for the existence of magic in the seventh grade. He didn't even stop believing when there was an accident at the construction site his father was hammering away at day after day, and he passed away.He begged goblins to reforge his body, and pixies to retrieve his soul; he begged the fae to save his father; he begged the elves to carry him home from the great, far-off there to the well known and familiar here. If anything, he believed even more.
It wasn't until his mother followed his father in the eighth grade that he truly stopped. Had it been an accident, he may have been able to hang on to that belief. Had he found out in a different way, had anything been different, he may have been able to think magic still existed and fairies still flew. But it was no accident, and the chips fell how they did. For how could this version of a beautiful reality, where pigs really could have wings and stars really were made to wished upon and mermaids really did save the lives of stranded sailors, not be fictitious? And if it was real, did they all just really hate him? Because, standing there, stock-still, in his living room, watching the blood drip from his mother's fingertips - it was either fiction and he was wrong, or fact and he was being punished.
He chose to believe the first, because the latter was unbearable. No one wants to believe the one thing they love the most, whether it be God or Grandma or Copernicus, hates them or is punishing them. So he gave it up. He threw away his drawings of Neverland, burned the fairy houses, and abandoned his journal in the attic of the house he was now being forced to leave.
Of course, while he was more than a child, he was still less than an adult, and less-than-adults are not allowed to live on their own.

He started freshman year at a new school, in a new place, trying to call a new house a home, but of course, that never really works when your heart lies somewhere else. He tried to fit in, tried to make connections with the other children around him, but big, empty houses get so cold at night, and the orphanage was just that: big and empty. There were about eight other children living in the three-story monster of a house, and enough corridors and rooms for each of those nine children (including himself) to visit four rooms in a row and never once come across one another.
Sometimes that vastness was a blessing. Getting lost in an old house full of old things can be quite the adventure when accustomed to the nothing-ever-happens of small-town Nowhere, just ten miles south of Nothing and nine miles east of "Honey, I think we're lost." Old closets made perfect hiding places, and broken things made great projects for one with too much time and too little friends. Yet, sometimes that vastness was a curse, because as I said earlier, big, empty houses can get so cold at night. Because when there is absolute silence, and the bats begin to wake up and the sun has set to sleep, and there is no kind of distraction, his only thoughts were on them. Not the fairies he had abandoned and whom he thought had abandoned him, but rather his parents. Mom. Dad. Mom's soft voice that used to tuck him into bed until he felt he had outgrown those children's stories. Dad's amazing, home-cooked dinners that he always took for granted. The time dad bought those baseball tickets for just the two of them, the time mom brought home marshmallows and graham crackers and so much chocolate and they made s'mores in the fireplace.
He wasn't too old anymore. He wouldn't take those dinners for granted. He would listen to every children's story his mother told him, tell his dad how good those dinners really were. He would thank them both every morning after waking up and every night just before going to sleep. He would hug his parents just before going to school every single morning, and he would never ever think about running away again. He wasn't too old anymore. If they would just come home, he would do all that. That seemed to him like a pretty good promise, a fine incentive, so why wouldn't they just come sauntering through the doors of the orphanage to pick him up and take him home and wrap him up in their arms and say that everything would be okay, nothing would ever go wrong again, because they were here and they would protect him and they would never leave him again.
But, of course, he rationally knew they never would, and that's what made him feel even more alone than he already did. No one was coming, because ghosts don't exist, and he told himself he would do good to remember that. Ghosts are not real, and neither are any of the other things he left behind in that house - his house - full of the aroma of a thousand dinners past and echoes of "Stellaluna."

The first birthday he had in the orphanage came and went with one adult and nine children at a dining table and a cake with a candle in it. No one knew what kind of presents to get him, and he said he didn't want any anyway.
That day he had turned fourteen, and his parents didn't sing to him. His mother didn't kiss him on the forehead, his father didn't throw his arm around his shoulders and say "Happy Birthday, son." He simply ate a slice of cake, and went to bed, the sympathetic look of the orphanage director following him up the wooden stairs. No matter how he tried, though, he couldn't sleep. He couldn't see, either, it was too dark and blurry with nighttime and tears, but he stumbled out of bed anyway and wandered. From the second floor to the third floor, and from the third floor, he found a hatch in the ceiling and climbed a chair into the attic.
It was dark, of course. It was also cold, as the house usually was as well. There were things strewn everywhere, broken things and old things and things he couldn't place. These were different than his broken things that he found around the house and fixed for the hell of it. Rather, these broken things were broken things that would have to stay broken. Things he couldn't fix, but was glad he had come across anyway, for they were fun to look at. Clocks that wouldn't tick, pocket watches with broken chains, torn dresses and water damaged papers. There was an old, leather bound notebook, which he opened and started to read. It was a diary. A woman's diary, judging by the curly, elegant handwriting, how the curves were really curves and not spikes as his tended to be.
He read three passages before deciding to take it back down with him. He liked reading it. It was like reading Anne Frank, without the hiding or dangerous parts. He read a kind of sadness in her words, noticed how in tone of the passages she referred to her guardian as Nanny and not mother. He felt she could relate better than the orphanage director, and that she was nicer than the other eight children he shared the house with.